Technical Explanations for the CB Radio Craze?

The Dukes of Hazzard used CB's heavily as well. Fun fact: The radio Uncle Jesse used on the base was a President Washington.


~Cheers~

Truckers before deregulation often used the cb to warn other drivers mostly the gypsy drivers that were hauling loads with no legal authority to haul loads where the patrols, and open scales were. Please don't ask me to get very in depth about the whole regulation and deregulation of the trucking industry, I was only 10 when that occurred.

Another thing truckers used the cb to organize the trucker shut downs of the 70s and the 80s which started the organization of ooida (owner operators independent drivers association) which is still going to this day.

Back when I was kid apart from being a valuable tool for the road user, cb was much like twitter and Tinder but without mobile phones or the internet.
Cb was a huge part of the social scene in the small town I grew up in .And like a number of guys I met my future wife on cb.

vkrules said:

Back when I was kid apart from being a valuable tool for the road user, cb was much like twitter and Tinder but without mobile phones or the internet.
Cb was a huge part of the social scene in the small town I grew up in .And like a number of guys I met my future wife on cb.

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Same here...Talked nightly with friends. Snagged a few hotties I met on air, couple chubbies too.

vkrules said:

Back when I was kid apart from being a valuable tool for the road user, cb was much like twitter and Tinder but without mobile phones or the internet.
Cb was a huge part of the social scene in the small town I grew up in .And like a number of guys I met my future wife on cb.

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You're not kidding. I can remember times when the radio was sooo busy, that there was no way to get a word in edgewise on any of the 40 channels. Skip made it impossible to talk, unless you ran an amp and ran the best antenna. Single sideband was also getting crowded when AM got too busy. Night was the best time to talk after the skip had faded off.

Many different social cliques were formed. Potheads, truckers, kids, older folk, H&Ders and drunks could always be found on certain channels. A real zoo. Driving trough Nevada would get come-ons from hookers at houses of ill repute. They still do that today - too.

What changed next was adding/using illegal freqs above/below the standard 40 channels; they seemed to be used far more often. The FCC would roll through town once/twice a year and scoop up the worst offenders, often given up by neighbors who hated all of the TV interference they were causing with dirty radios and cheap but plentiful amps.

At least, that is what happened where I lived . . .

Back to the original question, I can't really think of any great technical leap forward that fueled the CB craze. While the development of the PLL to replace crystal-control is a definite advance it can't be considered as a driving reason for CBs popularity.

Most CB operators had little to no technical knowledge of how the radio worked - and they didn't need to. Although licenses were still required it was not necessary to pass any type of test to obtain one.

That may have been a contributing factor- that anyone could get on the air for the price of a license. Remember: during this time it was considerably more difficult to get an amateur license. Most people didn't want to learn the code or theory, they just wanted to talk. CB afforded them that opportunity.

It would be difficult to pinpoint any one specific thing that caused CBs to take off during that time, but 'Convoy' could be considered a good starting point. The song came along at the right time and radio stations played it constantly. The marketing types saw that it was catching on and they went to work exploiting the fad with everything and anything branded with CB. Everyone wanted to be on the latest thing and the rest is history.

Good luck with your book.

Mudfoot said:

Snagged a few hotties I met on air, couple chubbies too.

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I found that if they talked on the radio all the time they were a chubbie.

w9cll said:

I found that if they talked on the radio all the time they were a chubbie.

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too bad for you, while that was sometimes the case, I met some cuties over the years.
looking them up on facebook now-a-days...
scary stuff.

since cb was took out of the hams hands,, little happened until the show Highway Patrol came on then there was a surge for a while for cb then units got smaller and simplier to operate then early 70s trucking was the industry that was glamorized at least in the part of the country i was in,,, cb really took off when the fuel embargo hit,,,by then radios was cheap and every street corner was some one to install it for you,,, way back when truckers used 3 and 6 channel mobile radios because they were small now it seems a trucker isnt happy unless his radio doesnt have 240 channels and will still only use one....

If there was any technical reason for the CB explosion it was the change to 40 channels. There were other technical changes, and because of these the FCC wouldn't allow existing 23 channel sets to be upgraded to 40 channels. So the 23 channel sets were dumped on the market for pennies on the dollar. I remember new 23 ch Cobra and Midland AM/SSB sets selling for less than $50. Decent AM sets sold for less than $25. A person could become part of the CB "in crowd" for next to nothing. Most of these folks only talked on 19 to and from work everyday, so 23 channels rigs were fine for them. It was a fun time.

- 399

Dan Albert said:

Awesome, that's just the kind of expertise I came her for.

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OK, The REAL reason(s) for CB expansion was the 1958 change from 460 - 470 Mega Cycles (UHF) to 27 Mega Hertz, the development of the RF power transistor which outdated vacuum tube transmitters, and the change from CLASS "A" and "B" licenses to the CLASS "D" permit system. yes, they were called LICENSES", but legally they were just a "PERMIT"

midnight special said:

since cb was took out of the hams hands....

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you hear that from many sources, but, Actually, CB never came from any band allocated to Amateurs they were SECONDARY users on 27 MHz which was a COMMERCIAL Business band in the U.S.

Road Squawker said:

you hear that from many sources, but, Actually, CB never came from any band allocated to Amateurs they were SECONDARY users on 27 MHz which was a COMMERCIAL Business band in the U.S.

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That's the way I always understood it.

For amateurs to use it requires a different antenna or tuner since 11 meters isn't a harmonic frequency of the amateur bands. This is before the WARC bands were established.

So why would anyone bother back then?

I think the confusion is because 11 meters is a HF band so people might assume it came from the amateur bands

In the 1950s, when the USSR pulled several lengths ahead of the US in the space race, math and science curricula in public schools got a financial shot in the arm, big time. This resulted - in part - in Las Vegas High School becoming THE southern Nevada school as far as such subjects was concerned. Vegas High was right in the center of the town. Rancho High was in North Las Vegas, and a couple other high schools were just being built. The overall program called for Vegas High to establish a CB station to help coordinate the county Electronics Education program among the various high schools. "We" were licensed as 11QØØ82 in 1958.
One of my first tasks was to assist the teacher, Chris Delzer (K7LBQ, formerly KØOEI, now probably SK) in adjusting a 3-element HY-Gain 11 meter Yagi. We got a baseline SWR, and he went up on the roof, made an adjustment and then stepped as far away from the antenna as he could so as not to distort things too much. He then stomped his foot three times. My job then was to key the Hallicrafters transceiver, announce "This is 11QØØ82 testing", then verify the amount of change, yell it over to the door where other students yelled it up to the roof. Another change, and another test. And then...

...a loud, clear voice from inside the transceiver filled the room: "Eleven Cue Zeiro Zeiro Ate Too, I know you cawn't awnswer me, mate, as your FCC won't allow it, but it's still a ham band hereabouts. You're putting in a foine signal inta Johannesburg! G'day from Zed Ess Too Baker Lima. Seven three."

I hollered at the door "Don't change ANYTHING! It's FINE!"

Mr. Delzer's first concern: "You didn't talk to him, did you???" I said no, I hadn't - I was still transfixed at the voice coming from pretty darn close to the actual other side of the world. And that's when I started working toward my Novice license.

And that's MY story of how the CB craze affected me. That was the first - and last - time I used CB.